I recently cooked a charity dinner for my son’s school. The fellow who was organizing the wines, the sommelier and wine writer Josh Eisen, wanted to serve an after-dinner drink, a sweet wine or brandy, and some kind of something to go with, but our menu finished with dessert (lemon ginger cake). I was only stumped for a nanosecond because I knew I had a block of semisweet dark chocolate in the pantry, leftover from a truffle-making enterprise around Valentine’s Day.

I’d made a batch of truffles with dried cherries that I preserved over the summer, and another batch that was plain chocolate, but rolled in organic powdered peanut butter, which I have to say was rather awesome. It is very easy to whip up homemade chocolates and they always blow diners away. Often I will just make a bark—the easiest chocolate treat of all.

So for the dinner I promised Josh I’d come up with some kind of homemade chocolate. I knew I had an array of dried fruits from the summer. And then I remembered the crystallized ginger I’d made from leftover ginger used to make ginger syrup. Wow. Talk about easy and totally delicious.